[X3D-Public] multiuser mode (newbie question)

[John Carlson]

On May 5, 2010, at 12:23 AM, Chris Thorne wrote:

> 
> DIS and XMPP are examples of application protocols that the network sensor was designed to support at a portable node level - i.e. without requiring a proprietary java or C implementation. Perhaps there are alternative ways to do this in portable X3D code, I don't know.
> 
> "Perhaps more effort needs to be put into an easy to use, standard dynamic scenegraph that is implemented across all browsers, and the question about MU protocols will go away." - only if it also addresses peer to peer and client-server communications as well.
> 
> Anyway, I agree with your summary statement.

I think stuff like Ajax Push and BOSH over HTTP to server will be the solutions in the short term for multiuser stuff.  Later, we will need to uniquely identify objects as they flow through the web (UUIDs and GUIDs)  Perhaps stuff like CORBA will make a comeback.  Right now, HTML has id's that make items unique within a page.  They need to be extended to be global (within one world) or universal (for cross world identification) ids.  Perhaps that was what someone was talking about when they were talking about identity.  I see no reason not to use URI's or URN's for GUIDs within the WWW (perhaps that is why ids in JSF use URN-like syntax).  Interfacing the WWW to stuff like XMPP or CORBA or other proprietary protocols will likely require UUIDs.  One thing that is needed is to make UUIDs and GUIDs hard to guess/remember, for security reasons.  See webkeys.  No one should have to look at these ids--perhaps they should be in an encrypted package that goes along with the unencrypted stuff, and filled in with XPath by the browser.

John